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7 comments on “GT2030 Blog Posts”

Cotton requires a tremendous amount of water to be grown, organic cotton is no different. GMO derived textiles are not the future either. Will or will not ” Corn complete with cotton for investment”?The new green is not yellow ! WE have abundance of natural fiber alternatives Flax, Hemp, Ramie, wools, none of which require pesticides , herbicides or are GMO derived. Remember viscose is not natural , it is man made !

BY my humble opinion, this report shows two key patterns and is probably a combination of the two. You can decide which is the stronger influence:

Pattern 1) It is a smart, verging on brilliant, piece of subtle scare/shock writing/dogma/pro-national PR, designed to ensure the continuing socio-economic-political trends of the past 20-30+ years. You get an A++ for your very professional communications design. Nice China cooperation scenario boosting, but a bit overtly obvious.

Pattern 2) Shocking gaps in the “Black Swan” and other key scenarios decry both a planned negation of some scenarios for security and other purposes, while also exhibiting a somewhat shallow naivete’, regarding the “ground-level” realities around the world. Some of the “gaps” would understandably not be mentioned for national and international security purposes but others show a possible detrimental naivete’/Cultural ignorance/detail-related-domino-effect-ignorance and an overall lack of realism regarding the “other” State and Non-State players in the new great game(s) of the 21st century.

This report in some ways shows significant Intelligence weaknesses in the US Intelligence establishment and the decades old, dangerous, dumbing-down for the actual Policy makers, which did not work well in the Iraq debacle and will fare far worse in larger global issues in the coming decades. But very well done word-smithing and communications design.

If the world was so simple I would agree with the assessment, but there are worse scenarios than what is mentioned and what is disturbing is that I honestly think it is not on the NIC radar. There are western-centric and economic-centric blind-spots which run so deep in the report, that they become precursors to Black Swan scenarios.

Also this naive impression that as long as the economy “grows”, everything else will fall into place is ridiculous. Also the impression that “more middle class” equals a happier country is also a myth.

To this date of my life, the “happiest” and “healthiest” humans and families of humans I have ever seen, were NOT Middle Class or Upper Class. This concept of the “poverty line” is not really accurate in some countries. There are millions of incredibly HAPPY “poor” people around the world actually…but maybe less and less………

Have you been to China? Brazil??? I think Nigeria has also been a “booming economy”, oh yes and we can’t forget India….You really have to see, smell, taste and touch these places to really understand just how serious it is.

The biggest myth is that “Free Capitalism” is the “new” savior for the world.

Capitalism has always been around and has always been “free”, as long as the Mongols, Persians, Greeks, Romans etc… were getting their taxes…they rarely kill the economies…. Just read the Periplus of the Erythian Sea from around 60AD. There was so much trade in 300 BC that in India they were minting fake Greek coins. Even Alexander was following very old trade routes all the way to Bactria and the Indo-HellenicPersian culture, before and during the Romans was and still is in some ways, thriving trade-wise. Even the entire Iron Age from c800BC to Rome is an example of a “free-market” Capitalist society from the Celtic Isles and Gaul to China, through Rome and Persia etc…Slaves, spices Gold etc…

There has ALWAYS been “Capitalism”. Humans have ALWAYS “capitalized” on each other and if you want to see full-on, free-market Capitalism, then visit today Nigeria, India, Mexico, Manila…..cities who have been “developed” and economically successful for centuries and in the case of India, for 3,000 years and “booming” for the past 2,500 years(minus droughts and the British paraste phase,…Rome was sending 250 ships a year to India…Pepper and Cinnamon, gems, Gold, Fabrics etc….!!!… and that isn’t even the Chinese and Arab ships..

But actually, things have changed in India, After 3,000 years of successful farming in India, now people are dieing from kidney diseases from over-use of pesticides, which are pushed because it makes the agri corporations more “economically prosperous”..15,000 farmers have committed suicide by going into debt and losing farms that went back centuries++..after nevr having to get a loan for 3,000 years……meanwhile, the bees, which pollinate/fertilize 33% of the global food supply are dying significantly and now the evidence is in this week, check your open-source intelligence, it is the excessive build-up of the pesticides in the soil, where the bees hibernate in the winter and soak up the poisons, which the regulators didn’t consider, despite the data being there……Frogs too are dying out..

There are better ways to do things which still make your nation prosperous, your corporations(actually, their Shareholders, the CEOs have no choice) are brutes, but no worse than any other country, the Europeans are aggressive, but so is everybody – which is why the “developing world” decided that full-on unrestrained Capitalism, was working well for the past 3,000+ years, so why stop now???

in the developing world, the “poverty” is instrumental to the upper 10%s way of life, their “freedom” (to have luxury and servants, cheap prostitutes etc..), and high profit margins..and the US too, which is why the masquerades zone9very scary place actually..) has been so busy for 3-4 decades, instead of giving jobs to kids in Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit or Denver, New Orleans..but it allowed you to flood the corn market, but still, the many factory jobs might have spread the wealth in the US better..,… so I guess it was worth it ….Or EA games setting up Manila 3D artist studios for their games… …… It has nothing to do with “developing”,…maybe “undeveloped ethics”…….In a country like Uganda, for much of the 90s, they could have stopped Joseph Kony in the early 90s, when he began but the South controls the country and it is better to keep the North unstable and they have always had a large enough military to deal with this 500-1200 man/child poorly trained jungle militia… Likewise in Sudan, it was always better to keep the South unstable and powerless. It works. Keep the populace “undeveloped” and they will be less trouble…

My point is that brute, unethical Capitalism has always been around and should be nothing to be proud of. Ethical Capitalism(which includes ethical regulation of the economy and economic practices…) is what has been lost in the West.

BUT this brute mentality, which has crept back into the American, UK (never left them..) and Canadian Oligarchical psyche over the past 30 years, simply reverts you back to where the “rest” always have been (and still is). In a high state of hyper-capitalism as opposed to ethical-capitalism.

It also creates other blind spots which are related to this base-type of human social parasitism mentality and that is one of the things which will bite you on the ass in the end. India is now coming up to theirs I think. Pakistan too. Maybe China…juries out on that one..

I don’t blame the ‘corporations”, the CEOs and CFOs have no choice or to be sued, if they do not follow the corporate clauses of the corporation’s constitution and the constitution usually orders them to “maximize profits”,

It is the Shareholders, who program these mega-machines and blindly order them to “increase” profits regardless of consequences and now that many of the shareholders are hedge funds and pensions etc… there is now a very concrete, almost complete “separation of human ethics and human conscience” from the ground-level practices of the typical large corporation….

Teddy Roosevelt, whom I respect a lot, tried to sound the alarm and I think it saved the small local economy structures of the west for much of the 20th century…didn’t really stop the big monopolies, but he was a great man to try…very brave…, Carnegie also helped create a good example 9wrote The Gospel Of Wealth in the 1890s) against human social parasitism and economic parasitism but that is mostly gone now and Dwight D. Eisenhower also tried to sound the alarm,

Anyway, if the issues in the report were the only ones, I would not be worried or disturbed at all…:) But the worst dangers are due to significant blind spots, which are prevalent in the report.